What a joy it is to have a space to work on big ideas — and a table to draft on.
The Old Shoe Factory was the perfect space to revisit my old sketchbooks and reinvigorate ideas that have been quietly gathering dust.
There’s something magic about having room to spread out, to see things side by side, that makes connections possible. Ideas that might have seemed unrelated when tucked away in separate notebooks suddenly begin to rhyme.
My art and illustration can be characterised as exercises in excruciating detail. I love getting lost in the minutiae: the mark-making, the line-work, the symbolism that might go unnoticed at first glance. I can spend hundreds of hours on tiny image details, adding layers of meaning and practising perfectionism.
Spending a few hours in the Old Shoe Factory was an opportunity to take a step back and see the bigger picture. After all, as a visual artist, I need to be able to do that with individual pieces, but what about a collection of works?
What happens when all those individual pieces become part of something larger? That’s where my storywriting comes in. All the illustrations, sketches and vignette paintings that I’ve been working off and on for almost 30 years, they are not just images, they are fragments of a story.
I have a collection of characters and strange little ideas from my interior world. I’m creating a story with them. Or perhaps, more accurately, I’m trying to build a world in which stories can happen. Which is where artistic practice is important. Having a studio or a space to work out ideas is crucial, where I can realise how everything fits together.
As with questions that would arise in the Old Shoe Factory: What histories have shaped it? Who inhabited it? What kind of a place is it? And what remnants still tell its story? I am investigating the paper trail of my interior world.
This year has been an exercise in learning when to zoom in and zoom out. As I have been largely storywriting this year, I have found that I have the same preoccupation with detail in words as I do in drawing.
That’s why having the space to work on big ideas has given me permission to spread things out, revisit old thoughts and see what happens when they sit alongside one another.
I’m connecting the dots, following odd tangents, and seeing where they lead. I’m not entirely sure what the bigger picture looks like yet, but it’s the journey that’s the point, rather than the destination.
